6 ms·

So with FastMail under Australian privacy-bashing laws and now this, what are our options for secure, private e-mail?

CameronNemo 5y ago
Protonmail and fastmail are different offerings. Proton offers encryption features, while fastmail makes no effort to promote encryption. So tutanota would be a good alternative to protonmail. And mailbox.org is a good alternative to fastmail. Both are based in Germany.
- superflit 5y ago
  Occupied Germany is worse[1] Germany will handle your data as fast as you can order an hans schnitzel. [1] - https://militarybases.com/overseas/germany/ https://militarybases.com/overseas/germany/
  - merb 5y ago
    well posteo didn't. they tried to fight it as long as possible.
    - superflit 5y ago
      There is no fighting. When you have 21 bases in your land.
- ranguna 5y ago
  From tutanota: > Storage only takes place for IP addresses made anonymous which are therefore not personal data any more. What the heck does "IP addresses made anonymous" mean?
krono 5y ago
Email from any serviceprovider can be considered as secure and private as public conversations.
keewee7 5y ago
If you're doing subversive activities against a Western country you should probably use some Russian or Chinese state-owned service.
- glitcher 5y ago
  Part of the issue is that the bar for subversive activities in the eyes of western law enforcement seems to be getting lower and lower. I don't know the specifics of this case, but it seems many authorities are also not shy about using these methods to identify and track peaceful protesters as well.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    while i agree this is a problem, this is something that isn't to blame on protonmail (or any other company following the law). This is something that should be changed through politics/lawmaking.
blacklion 5y ago
Your own self-hosted service on rented server / cloud instance? AFAIU (IANAL!!!) you can refuse to give evidences against yourself in most jurisdictions. I don't thinks that dedicated server provider (like Hetzner) or cloud provider (like Digital Ocean or Vultr) stores traffic logs with enough details to be useful in such case. But payment will be a problem...
- upbeat_general 5y ago
  It’s certainly possible that they store IP addresses. Even if they don’t, as long as they have the email address then they can probably find the mail server even if the payment is anonymous.
  - ta988 5y ago
    They absolutely keep who used which IP at what time. And they do not allow anonymous purchases.
  - blacklion 5y ago
    Find mail server itself — sure. Find all clients which submitted mail through it in the past — I'm in doubt. Anonymous/protected enough payment is the problem.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  You can't be compelled to incriminate yourself, but your server provider can very much be compelled to give access to the server. And once the server is physically compromised the battle is lost, anyway, but in that case probably with a larger papertrail leading to you. One expensive but possible option would be to build a server yourself with sufficient traps to shut off when it's tapered with. Then set it up with full disk encryption and put it in a shared rack.
  - chrononaut 5y ago
    > .. and put it in a shared rack What would be the benefit of being in a shared rack? Wouldn't the service provider still know which physical system is yours if you only rented a 1/2/3U space? (Or is there an advantage at a network layer?)
Youden 5y ago
Honest question, because I've been asking it of myself: what do you expect from such a service? I basically decided to just give up. Email is an insecure protocol and there's not much that can be done about it. Choosing a "secure" email provider feels like choosing a "secure" VPN provider: it's impossible to verify the provider's claims so it's a kind of security theatre.
- cartoonworld 5y ago
  It's impossible to choose a "secure" email provider, unfortunately. Email can't guarantee E2EE without a block cipher tool like GPG. Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA. If you email google, google gets to do whatever googly stuff it would like to do with its algorithm. If you email exchange, roundcube, ISP, hotmail, it could wind up being archived to tape, or simply be sitting for a long time in some unencrypted mail spool, maybe in a public cloud. If you selfhost, you would be forgiven if you find you have made a mistake or simply got pwned. I've never selfhosted email, but I understand it is a lot of work to set up if you aren't familiar, and while maintenance is okay once you get rolling, there are occasional emergencies or hiccups that require intervention. Aside from being much slower, regular mail is quite better since you can easily inspect the envelope for evidence of tampering, while email will be imperceptibly copied.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    > Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA. What? If Alice encrypts an email to Bob, using Bob's PGP key on her laptop, then it doesn't matter how many MTAs that email passes through, the email stays encrypted at every hop. > it could wind up being archived to tape I guess you're saying that an encrypted email could travel through a provider that keeps a copy of it in the hopes that quantum computers will one day be cheaply available enough that they can crack the private key and read the email. That seems expensive (and illegal) for a company to do just on a whim (assuming the sender and recipient are periodically deleting old emails), and I'd like to think that a judge would turn down a request for a warrant that covers data that won't be readable for a decade or more.
rakoo 5y ago
For this specific issue, find a provider that can be accessed through Tor. But if you want truly private and secure communication, you'll have to forget about email. Even with encryption there's still way too much metadata floating around that can identify you.
skitter 5y ago
One option not mentioned yet is Posteo. They don't keep your IP and strip it in case your mail client sets it in the headers. They also don't take any personal identification for signup or billing (you can even send them letters with money to pay for a mailbox).
- luckylion 5y ago
  I don't know what came of it, but they've been told by the German constitutional court that their approach ("we're using NAT, we don't know the IP on the actual server") doesn't fly and does not protect them from complying with a court order.
  - kazen44 5y ago
    This is correct. This also applies to ISP's and wiretaps. They need to provide NAT mappings when doing a wiretap if i remember correctly.
Saris 5y ago
I say don't use email, it's not a good choice for private communications.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  I agree that one should not use it for private comms. But many people have to use it, and they would rather not use a provider like MS or Google. For those people, mailbox.org is a good offering (IMO).
uuidgen 5y ago
Anything that you access using thunderbird with GPG configured? It gives no worse privacy guarantees than protonmail and possibly way better - because if you use protonmail through a web client and they get a court order to serve you a "special" client that forwards your certificate you won't notice it.
aloisdg 5y ago
tutanota?
HiroProtagonist 5y ago
Lavabit?

Protonmail and fastmail are different offerings. Proton offers encryption features, while fastmail makes no effort to promote encryption. So tutanota would be a good alternative to protonmail. And mailbox.org is a good alternative to fastmail. Both are based in Germany.

superflit 5y ago
Occupied Germany is worse[1] Germany will handle your data as fast as you can order an hans schnitzel. [1] - https://militarybases.com/overseas/germany/ https://militarybases.com/overseas/germany/
- merb 5y ago
  well posteo didn't. they tried to fight it as long as possible.
  - superflit 5y ago
    There is no fighting. When you have 21 bases in your land.
ranguna 5y ago
From tutanota: > Storage only takes place for IP addresses made anonymous which are therefore not personal data any more. What the heck does "IP addresses made anonymous" mean?

krono 5y ago

Email from any serviceprovider can be considered as secure and private as public conversations.

keewee7 5y ago

If you're doing subversive activities against a Western country you should probably use some Russian or Chinese state-owned service.

glitcher 5y ago
Part of the issue is that the bar for subversive activities in the eyes of western law enforcement seems to be getting lower and lower. I don't know the specifics of this case, but it seems many authorities are also not shy about using these methods to identify and track peaceful protesters as well.
- kazen44 5y ago
  while i agree this is a problem, this is something that isn't to blame on protonmail (or any other company following the law). This is something that should be changed through politics/lawmaking.

blacklion 5y ago

Your own self-hosted service on rented server / cloud instance? AFAIU (IANAL!!!) you can refuse to give evidences against yourself in most jurisdictions. I don't thinks that dedicated server provider (like Hetzner) or cloud provider (like Digital Ocean or Vultr) stores traffic logs with enough details to be useful in such case. But payment will be a problem...

upbeat_general 5y ago
It’s certainly possible that they store IP addresses. Even if they don’t, as long as they have the email address then they can probably find the mail server even if the payment is anonymous.
- ta988 5y ago
  They absolutely keep who used which IP at what time. And they do not allow anonymous purchases.
- blacklion 5y ago
  Find mail server itself — sure. Find all clients which submitted mail through it in the past — I'm in doubt. Anonymous/protected enough payment is the problem.
Sebb767 5y ago
You can't be compelled to incriminate yourself, but your server provider can very much be compelled to give access to the server. And once the server is physically compromised the battle is lost, anyway, but in that case probably with a larger papertrail leading to you. One expensive but possible option would be to build a server yourself with sufficient traps to shut off when it's tapered with. Then set it up with full disk encryption and put it in a shared rack.
- chrononaut 5y ago
  > .. and put it in a shared rack What would be the benefit of being in a shared rack? Wouldn't the service provider still know which physical system is yours if you only rented a 1/2/3U space? (Or is there an advantage at a network layer?)

Youden 5y ago

Honest question, because I've been asking it of myself: what do you expect from such a service? I basically decided to just give up. Email is an insecure protocol and there's not much that can be done about it. Choosing a "secure" email provider feels like choosing a "secure" VPN provider: it's impossible to verify the provider's claims so it's a kind of security theatre.

cartoonworld 5y ago
It's impossible to choose a "secure" email provider, unfortunately. Email can't guarantee E2EE without a block cipher tool like GPG. Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA. If you email google, google gets to do whatever googly stuff it would like to do with its algorithm. If you email exchange, roundcube, ISP, hotmail, it could wind up being archived to tape, or simply be sitting for a long time in some unencrypted mail spool, maybe in a public cloud. If you selfhost, you would be forgiven if you find you have made a mistake or simply got pwned. I've never selfhosted email, but I understand it is a lot of work to set up if you aren't familiar, and while maintenance is okay once you get rolling, there are occasional emergencies or hiccups that require intervention. Aside from being much slower, regular mail is quite better since you can easily inspect the envelope for evidence of tampering, while email will be imperceptibly copied.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  > Even if your provider stores and transmits only encrypted email data, once sent it does not maintain that guarantee while being passed by another entity's MTA. What? If Alice encrypts an email to Bob, using Bob's PGP key on her laptop, then it doesn't matter how many MTAs that email passes through, the email stays encrypted at every hop. > it could wind up being archived to tape I guess you're saying that an encrypted email could travel through a provider that keeps a copy of it in the hopes that quantum computers will one day be cheaply available enough that they can crack the private key and read the email. That seems expensive (and illegal) for a company to do just on a whim (assuming the sender and recipient are periodically deleting old emails), and I'd like to think that a judge would turn down a request for a warrant that covers data that won't be readable for a decade or more.

rakoo 5y ago

For this specific issue, find a provider that can be accessed through Tor. But if you want truly private and secure communication, you'll have to forget about email. Even with encryption there's still way too much metadata floating around that can identify you.

skitter 5y ago

One option not mentioned yet is Posteo. They don't keep your IP and strip it in case your mail client sets it in the headers. They also don't take any personal identification for signup or billing (you can even send them letters with money to pay for a mailbox).

luckylion 5y ago
I don't know what came of it, but they've been told by the German constitutional court that their approach ("we're using NAT, we don't know the IP on the actual server") doesn't fly and does not protect them from complying with a court order.
- kazen44 5y ago
  This is correct. This also applies to ISP's and wiretaps. They need to provide NAT mappings when doing a wiretap if i remember correctly.

Saris 5y ago

I say don't use email, it's not a good choice for private communications.

CameronNemo 5y ago
I agree that one should not use it for private comms. But many people have to use it, and they would rather not use a provider like MS or Google. For those people, mailbox.org is a good offering (IMO).

uuidgen 5y ago

Anything that you access using thunderbird with GPG configured? It gives no worse privacy guarantees than protonmail and possibly way better - because if you use protonmail through a web client and they get a court order to serve you a "special" client that forwards your certificate you won't notice it.

aloisdg 5y ago

tutanota?

HiroProtagonist 5y ago

Lavabit?